CSotD: Happy 150th Birthday, America!
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I've been feeling a little burned out lately and thought I'd take a break and play around in the files. Having no particular goal in mind beyond that, I decided to follow the example of our Canadian cousins and celebrate the 150th Anniversary of our country, so here are some comics from July 4, 1926.
The logo with which I led off is typical of the syndicated graphics newspapers were shipped in various formats. This is a cut from a larger piece that showed the whole flag and came with some verbiage that basically boiled down to something I hadn't known: That by a 1912 ordinance, the stars were each specifically designated for a particular state, in the order of their coming.
So, since a lot of things today are going to beg for embiggening simply to be legible, I thought I'd crop this down to the essential piece so you could find your own star, assuming you are from one of the 48. (And if you're from Hawaii, July 4 is the date in 1960 in which the flag with your state on it first flew.)
I saw that flag piece in several papers and I also saw this piece of trivia in a few. I'm curious now to know how many papers might have had it set up to run, only to have somebody in the back shop say, "That's not John Adams. That's his boy Quincy."
Because when these things get caught, that's generally who catches'em. And if you haven't alienated them too much, they'll point it out. And if you have, they'll just do as they're told and wait for that phone to start ringing.
Anyway, it ran in enough papers that I don't feel so bad about the ones that slip through these days. Seems the Good Old Days weren't the Perfect Old Days.
Hover over this to view your circular instead of the content you wanted.
On with the show:
The backshop missed this spelling of "European," too, but these historic cartoons, along with some illustrating Bible stories, were not uncommon a few years back. One thing I found in producing news "explainers" for kids is that adult readers enjoyed them in particular because it let them figure out, for instance, which ones were the Bosnians and which ones were the Serbs without having to look stupid by asking someone.
There was a huge market for these rustic/nostalgic panels, many of which were unremarkable but some of which — notably "Out Our Way" and "Our Boarding House" — became classics.
In case you thought golf gags were a new invention.
This style of humor also produced the model of the set-upon husband, among whom there is no greater example than …
Dear Jiggs, the hapless pawn of his social-climbing lace-curtain-Irish wife.
Not that he was alone, mind you. The fact that most cartoonists were men and it was assumed that Papa was the primary reader of the paper put husbands front-and-center in most cartoons, sometimes as the victims, sometimes as the clever ones who overcame their tormenters:
Sometimes, as in this Maurice Ketten piece, as a bit of both.
(It took me a minute, and some memory searching, to realize that the title panel takes place in the bathroom of a moving train as he realizes it's pulling into the station while he's still getting dressed.)
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Toots and Caspar followed — perhaps helped to set — a familiar pattern of the schlemiel married to the babe. Modern sitcoms owe Jimmy Murphy a great debt, though few of them carry it off as well as he did.
Speaking of babes, if I ever knew that Ernie Bushmiller was not the creator of Fritzi Ritz, I'd forgotten it long enough to be surprised to see it credited here to Larry Whittington. But catch the signature in the lower right hand corner — Bushmiller had already taken over the strip, though not all the newspapers had changed their headings to reflect the fact.
I like the idea that Barney is the grumpy bad guy and that we're rooting for the "fierce" dog. Maybe he should go take care of little Elmer, who could use a defender:
(And, by the way, Elmer looks like maybe he's the great-grandfather of some of those South Park kids, doesn't he?)
This strip was part of a kids' package in the Brooklyn Eagle, though it doesn't seem to me any more kid-oriented than most of the other stuff I came across.
I'm not sure I'd admit to having been on the panel of experts who settled on the name "Boob McNutt," but the cartoon itself is pretty funny, and I like the art.
This Rube Goldberg fella had a nice touch — I wonder if he ever did anything else?
And if I'm kidding about Goldberg, I do think I might look a little more into Harry Hairbreadth, who, as Don Markstein wrote, predated both Mighty Mouse and Dudley Do-Right in the cornball hero category and was both very popular and had an impact on the industry.
Another successful cartoon that seems to have disappeared from the collective consciousness, Somebody's Stenog is credited as one of the first to feature an independent working woman. This particular example is remarkably touching, given how women were generally depicted in comics back then.
Incidentally, having done a lot of playing around in back issues over the years, let me assure you that the move to keep kids from blowing off their hands and frightening the horses — and now both the dogs and veterans with PTSD — has gone on for years. If Cam was, indeed, living in a more "safe and sane" Fourth than before, we appear to have slid back.
Also, you can now buy moonshine at the liquor store. Legally. Back then, you couldn't buy much of anything in a liquor store. Legally.
Though the moonshine they sell today won't blow up, more's the pity.
Cam O'Flage wasn't the only one pondering the topic — Clare Briggs also brought it up, by way of mocking the humorless people who actually passed laws intended to protect kids against unsafe-insane celebrations.
Speaking of which, I didn't find a lot of editorial cartoons for some reason — it was certainly an active medium in those days — but I did find this Nelson Harding piece in which Uncle Sam decries the scandalous explosions that I suppose had begun five years earlier with Tea Pot Dome.
In about another three years, ol' Sam would find that holding your hands over your ears isn't the best way to handle fiscal malfeasance.
Speaking of lessons that don't ever seem to take hold.
Every generation apparently needs to stick its fingers in the fan.
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